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Country Water Action: Viet Nam
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The Government of Viet Nam is turning to its water resources to generate exportable energy from them that will supply the country with the capital it needs to modernize its cities and lift millions out of rural poverty.
At the center of Viet Nam's hydropower agenda is the Vu Gia-Thu Bon River Basin. Eight hydropower projects are proposed for the next 10 years in this basin, with some dams already under construction.
Naturally, this scale of hydropower development brings new "challenges and opportunities," writes consultant Jeremy Bird in an April 2006 draft report proposing to ADB a basin plan for the Vu Gia-Thu Bon.
The combination of these pre-existing environmental strains-such as coastal flooding and changes in river alignments, erosion, salinity intrusion, droughts, and industrial pollution-and the advent of hydropower calls for "an altogether more coordinated institutional response than the mandate that any one agency provides," Bird writes.
An innovative solution is already underway for this basin in Quang Nam province. There, a next generation of river basin organizations (RBOs) is being tested with assistance from ADB's Pilot and Demonstration Activity (PDA) program.
In actuality, RBOs in Viet Nam are a relatively young idea, but they've grown through some challenging times, prompting experts like Tim McGrath, a consultant hired by ADB to help facilitate the pilot project in Quang Nam, to think of ways to help develop a next and better generation of RBOs.
This next generation must succeed all the more in introducing Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) to various levels of government and communities belonging to the basin, all of which play a hand in how the basin is currently managed and need to be managed in light of the government's hydropower agenda.
A major challenge in establishing the organization, McGrath said, is Viet Nam's challenging history with RBOs, something Bird says is well acknowledged by the Government. Studies on Viet Nam's three major RBOs highlight the lack of a roadmap for where the RBOs should be headed, leaving the RBOs operating more reactively than proactively. As a result, two of the three major RBOs have rarely met since being established in 2004. Also problematic in the past has been their location in either Hanoi or Ho Chi Min City-rather than based near the communities on the management frontlines.
Parting with past performance, though, McGrath says, "This new committee could very well be a new model for Viet Nam and elsewhere … although it is a simple committee in that it only has to deal with one province, it is testing and proving good principles that other river basin organizations dealing with cross-jurisdictional roles and responsibilities can use."
Provincial stakeholders establishing this next generation RBO are encouraged to keep things:
Simple—in structure, membership, roles, and responsibilities; this way, the capacity of the organization grows with the capacity of its individual members, local planners, managers, technicians, and communities. "The key is to work with the province to develop and stabilize the basic institutional structure before more complex technical and planning issues are placed on the agenda of the organization," McGrath writes.
Practical—by involving community members in the new organization, the organization would come to understand and incorporate the priorities of the poor, their relationship to water resources, and how they resolve problems, and recover from natural disasters.
Replicable—experts would work with the new organizations on a model that aligns with national policy and institutional frameworks, not international or foreign models. As a result, early provincial implementers could demonstrate their scheme to other provinces and advocate it as a Viet Nam model for IWRM in basins.
By keeping it simple, practical and replicable, Quang Nam Province has established for itself a fully functioning RBO that is more participatory and innovative than its predecessors. And here's how the province accomplished this in just six months.
October 2005. The project started with 3 days of back-to-back consultations with key government stakeholders in Quang Nam Province. From these consultations, the provincial Department of Natural Resources and Environment (DoNRE) emerged as a leader among the stakeholder agencies.
December 2005. DonRE developed a workplan for the new organization and programs for its initial meetings and training sessions. The process was off to a good start by being locally-driven. Provincial government stakeholders displayed a keen willingness to learn about IWRM and the RBO operations, and a number emerged as champions of the project's objectives.
February 2006. The provincial stakeholders submitted an official proposal to the national government to establish an organization to manage the river basin. Within a month, the national government not only approved the proposal, but assigned a high ranking provincial vice chairman to chair the new organization. This appointment has been critical for mobilizing consistent participation of all stakeholder members.
March 2006-present. The new committee held its first meeting with 100% attendance of members. Subsequent meetings, held about every 6 weeks, also showed high levels of attendance. Meetings typically involve half a day of committee business and half a day of training on IWRM principles. The committee sets its agenda and chooses the training topics, which helps ensure the committee is demand-driven and operating practically.
McGrath believes that the committee's success and the direction it is going offer the Government of Viet Nam an alternative to the conventional RBOs of the past.
The committee is easily replicable on a provincial scale, but is taking on new initiatives to coordinate with a major nearby city that sits outside the province's jurisdiction but shares the Vu Gia basin waters. The committee is testing new approaches to keeping the city informed of its activities and establishing a working relationship.
"Crossing provincial boundaries and how to do that has never been successfully piloted in Viet Nam, but we're trying to do that with this committee," McGrath said.
The new committee will benefit from a second project phase that will assist it in setting up a roadmap beyond the basic training and institutional setup it has been working on in the first phase.
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